"We Never Imagined This Would Be Easy"

Mr. Mahdi, a Shiite politician, was tortured by Mr. Hussein's men, but prefers not to go into details. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser, can recount how, in his own case, Mr. Hussein's thugs folded him up into a ball, hung him from the ceiling and twirled him around for hours on end. Mr. Bremer, in a recent interview, described how at a dinner for members of the Iraqi Governing Council, a woman seated next to him had begun to tell the story of her murdered brother, killed by Mr. Hussein's men many years ago. Before she could finish she had begun to weep.

I asked Mr. Mahdi if it had all been worth it: the invasion, the guerrilla war, the car bombings, the assassinations. He gave a surprising answer.

"We were expecting much worse than this," said Mr. Mahdi, who does not discount the possibility that Iraq could slide into civil war. "Much worse."

"We never imagined this would be easy," he said. "We were telling the Americans, you will have a mess. It is mostly the psychological situation. The suffering."